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| Senator Simitian says K-12 education is failingSenator Simitian says K-12 education is failingBy California’s K-12 education system is a sinking ship with no quick fix in sight, State Senator Joe Simitian told a near-capacity crowd in Cubberley Auditorium last night. “The best starting point is to acknowledge that it’s dysfunctional,” said Simitian, who represents San Mateo, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties. “Rather than ensuring equal opportunity for all, we may have ensured an equal lack of opportunity across the board.” Addressing a full house, Simitian and Professor Emeritus of Education and Business Administration Michael Kirst unpacked the mess of school finance issues that weigh heavily on the minds of students, parents and educators in the state. The event, co-sponsored by the School of Education, The Roosevelt Institution and Haas Center for Public Service’s Call to Serve, was partly advertised as a forum on Proposition 88, which would raise $500 million a year for K-12 schools. Yet both speakers steered away from the proposition and instead broached the problems at the core of the education finance system. “I was really surprised they didn’t talk about Proposition 88, because I was actually here to listen to them talk about it,” said Mark Lieber, a co-terminal student in media studies. “They probably didn’t talk about it much because it has no chance of passing.” Simitian kicked off discussion by outlining the governmental barriers to promoting adequacy and efficiency within the school finance system. The system itself is at fault, he argued, because it perpetuates a blame game between bureaucrats and officials who refuse to take responsibility for policy failures and pass the buck to their colleagues. To make matters worse, those in the community who want to help the education system are discouraged from doing so because they cannot understand it, Simitian said. “I think we’re never going to be successful if people can’t comprehend how the system works,” he said. “It’s all so difficult that it just makes the average citizen just want to throw up their hands and walk away.” Simitian urged the audience to resolve these issues through incremental progress rather than revolutionary aims. Given California’s track record with resolving school finance issues, the likelihood of dramatic change is not high, he added. “We have to commit ourselves and keep our eye on the big picture so that we can make progress when and where we can,” he said.Kirst voiced similar concerns, but broadened the discussion with his own set of scholarly recommendations on how to buoy the sinking system. Among them, he advocated a merit-based pay system that links funding to academic standards. He also lauded the upwelling of successful charter schools across California, which run independently of public school systems and are fashioned in a way that meet individual community needs. “I think parents are showing they want charter schools,” Kirst said. “They provide support for populations that have been lost here, including dropouts.” Takafumi Kirimura, a graduate student in education visiting from Kyoto University, found that the talk helped him draw parallels between the problems facing both America and Japan’s educational systems. “I felt like the education system in Japan is following suit with America’s,” Kirimura said. “The education situation in Japan is out of control.” But Devin Ozdogu, a graduate student in education, said he left the talk wanting more. “It’s curious that neither speaker spent a significant amount of time on the distribution and training of the teacher workforce since the quality of teachers plays a huge — if not the biggest — role in educational outcomes,” Ozdogu said. Lieber said he too left the talk with a bad taste in his mouth. “It seemed like the message was that we just need to wait out this bad period,” Lieber said. “I left feeling like there’s little I can do because it’s so ridiculously complex. I left feeling more ignorant about everything than when I came in.” Simitian closed the discussion by reemphasizing the importance of school finance reform and touted the commitment of audience members towards addressing a difficult and often discouraging topic with worldwide implications. “We have to commit ourselves,” Simitian said. “To the extent we hold our society as a story of equal opportunity, our public schools are the clearest means to making that a reality. This is a matter not only of opportunity and viability, but of global security.” Click here to read the article from Stanford Dailys website. |
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